In 2013 many African youth decided to use social media and other media to gain the attention of Paypal. I will name two of the notable campaigns whose aim was for paypal to be brought to their respective countries. One of them is the outspoken change maker Samuel Darko who I mentioned earlier.

Paypal General telegraph

He started an online petition here: https://www.change.org/p/rupert-keeley-enable-paypal-in-ghana, to make it possible for people resident in Ghana to make or receive payments on the PayPal platform. His target was 5,000 signatures but was able to get about 2,486 signatures and a lot of social media buzz.

The second campaign was started by a Nigerian company called Creativity Kills, founded by Neo Ighodaro and they were also able to gain 597 supporters. These initiatives were very essential proving that the 'new' African is able to take the necessary steps for him/her to be heard.

These campaigns gained a lot of recognition but paypal was unresponsive for a long time until they finally decided to listen to the pleas of certain countries. According to Rupert Keeley, the executive in charge of the EMEA region of PayPal, as at Tuesday 17th of June, 2014, users from Nigeria and other countries from sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America were finally given access to be able to use the online payment platform. This meant PayPal was now being used in 203 countries.

This came as a shock to the Ghanaian technology community since we also petitioned as one of the blacklisted countries along with Nigeria but they were given access to the platform excluding us.

It made a little sense because Nigeria now has one of the biggest economies in Africa as well one of Africa's biggest with a population of 173.6 million as of 2013. Ghana on the other hand has a lesser population of about 25 million.

In my humble opinion, the reason paypal ignored us was that we made a lot of noise internally only on social media about our petition and as a result, the message did not get to the right desk at the Paypal offices.

We should have also made good use of institutions like the Ministry of foreign affairs to intervene on our behalf as well as push further the message out there to our networks in the Diaspora about the rise of young Ghanaian entrepreneurs.

FYI: A representative of Paypal, last week revealed that apart from South Africa, Nigeria is the second largest market for their payment solution, followed by Kenya.

“We are happy to see that PayPal has been widely welcomed by Nigerians since the launch of the service in the country last year,” the Head of Business Development Sub-Saharan Africa, Malvina Goldfeld said.

Untill then, some of us will use our meagre resources available to fight and bring paypal back to Ghana.

(This story was culled from the General Telegraph)


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